Agassiz, Louis

Agassiz, Louis (1807–1873), zoologist.Born in Switzerland, Agassiz earned degrees in zoology (1829) and medicine (1830) from the University of Munich. Encouraged by Georges Cuvier and Alexander von Humboldt, he studied fossil fish at the Muséum d'histoire naturelle in Paris for eight months. In 1832, he became director of a museum in Neuchâtel. Agassiz's Ice Age theory, which held that northern Europe had once been covered by a mass of ice, made him famous. In 1846, burdened by debt, he came to the United States to lecture and was lionized. Harvard gave him a professorship in 1850. His claim that human races were distinct creations, not descended from Adam and Eve, was welcomed by some supporters of slavery, but his belief that science should be independent of the Bible alienated religious conservatives. In his 1857 “Essay on Classification”, Agassiz argued that taxonomic categories, classes as well as species, reflect the Divine Intellect, as do links among embryos, fossils, and biogeography. When Charles Darwin's Origins of Species appeared in 1859, Agassiz contested it vigorously; he never accepted the theory of evolution. His greatest legacy was Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology (known as “the Agassiz Museum”), founded in 1859. With other leading men of science, he sought to make American science more professional. To that end, he promoted the creation of the National Academy of Sciences in 1863. His tactic of leaving students alone with a single fish, telling them to “study nature, not books!”, became legendary. He went by steamer up the Amazon River in 1865–1866, and in 1872 sailed to San Francisco. His 1873 summer school on Penikese Island proved a model for others. Agassiz's first wife, Cécile Braun, who bore three children, died in 1848. In 1850, he married Elizabeth Cary, who later founded Radcliffe College, the women's college associated with Harvard.
See also Science: Revolutionary War to World War I.

Bibliography

Edward Lurie , Louis Agassiz, 1960.
Mary P. Winsor , Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum, 1991.

Mary Pickard Winsor